DOAJ is confirmed as a unique platform for many open access journals and a key index for African journals

DOAJ indexes a diverse range of high-quality open access journals, and often more from under-represented regions than other indexes. Tom Olyhoek, Editor-in-Chief, takes a fresh look at the data and tells us how this data is helping to develop DOAJ’s Ambassador program.

In 2019, we published a study showing that DOAJ listed the largest number of quality Open Access journals by far. We have redone this analysis to find that this statement still holds true today. Indeed, 9873 journals indexed in DOAJ aren’t in Scopus or Web of Science (Figure 1).

Figure 1 is a Venn diagram showing the journal overlap between DOAJ, Web of Science and SCOPUS. It shows that DOAJ indexes 9873 journals that aren’t indexed in Scopus or Web of Science.

The newly revised data put the conclusions of a 2022 study on open access journals conducted by Bielefeld University in a different perspective. That study (ISSN-Matching of Gold OA Journals (ISSN-GOLD-OA) 5.0)  concluded that ‘only ~24% of all ISSNs and ~24% of all [known] open access journals are covered in DOAJ’. This way of presenting the data implies that Scopus and Web of Science have more complete coverage of open access journals than DOAJ. It implies that this is because DOAJ doesn’t index 2266 of the 7622 open access journals listed in Web of Science nor 3883 of the 9740 open access journals in Scopus. However, examining the same data set, we came to a different conclusion – namely, only 10% of ISSNs and 10% of all known open access journals are covered in Web of Science or Scopus.

While many journals in Web of Science and Scopus are not currently listed in DOAJ (often because they don’t meet our criteria), large numbers of quality open access journals in DOAJ are not included in either of those services (Figure 1). DOAJ indexes 11,730 journals that will not be found in Web of Science and 11,229 journals that are not in Scopus. DOAJ is, therefore, much more inclusive in its global coverage of open access journals than either Web of Science or Scopus.

DOAJ and OpenAlex

A recently published study using DOAJ and OpenAlex data also concluded that Web of Science and SCOPUS were less inclusive than DOAJ.

Our analysis went further to look at the percentages of open access journals from Africa and the Global South. For this, we used OpenAlex as a reference database and compared OpenAlex-listed open access journals from Africa and the Global South (May 2023) with the ISSN GOLD 5.0 data (January 2022) and with more recent lists of open access journals downloaded from DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science (March 2023). See Table 1. 

The results demonstrate a substantial difference in the various databases’ coverage of journals from Africa and the Global South. DOAJ has double the number of OA journals from Africa and five times the number of OA journals from Global South countries compared with the Web of Science.

	Africa OA %	Global South OA %
DOAJ	21 [19]	34 [33]
Scopus	13 [15]	10 [10]
Web of Science	10 [11]	7 [8]

The OpenAlex data also confirmed that DOAJ indexes more African and Global South journals than Scopus or Web of Science (Table 2).

	Africa OA	Global South OA
DOAJ	287 / 1340	5606 / 16,310
Scopus	184 / 1340	1783 / 16,310
Web of Science	136 / 1340	1292 / 16,310

We should note at this point that OpenAlex did not include all the journals indexed in DOAJ: 2016 of the 19,155 journals in DOAJ could not be found in OpenAlex.

And while OpenAlex contains 1340 open access journals from Africa, our North African ambassadors reported 919 OA journals in the Egyptian EKB ( whose website is currently offline at the time of publishing this post), 800 OA journals in the Algerian OA journals platform, and more from Tunisia and  Morocco. This leads us to predict that there are more OA journals in Africa than are currently listed in OpenAlex but that most of these non-indexed journals have never been reviewed by any indexing service, so their OA status and quality are unclear.

This backs up a far from encouraging conclusion that although DOAJ has substantially better coverage of journals from Africa and the Global South than Web of Science or Scopus, it remains a fact that the majority of the known open access journals from areas are not listed by any of the major indexing services at all, including DOAJ!

Our data-driven ambassador program

DOAJ’s mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. Therefore, using the results from this analysis and in line with our mission, we will focus on including more journals from the African continent.

We will concentrate our efforts on those journals from OpenAlex that are not listed in the DOAJ because their statuses are documented. We will focus on Nigeria and Ghana, working with WACREN to increase our coverage of journals from both countries. At the same time, the other DOAJ ambassadors in Africa will continue to work on increasing the number of quality open access journals in DOAJ from their respective regions.

Tom thanks Marten Klencke for the help and advice with the data analysis.